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"A Rumor of Angels", by Dale Bailey, is a fantasy novelette that takes place during the period of the dust bowl in the American Midwest. A teenage boy walks away from his father's wasted farm to follow the other travelers heading west where there is a rumor of angels.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Nightmare Magazine, December 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edited by John Joseph Adams and Charles Yu, and Year's Best Weird Fiction: Volume Four (2017), edited by Hellen Marshall and Michael Kelly.

Read the full story for free at Nightmare Magazine.

In this contemporary fantasy, the grieving biographer of a Victorian fantasist finds himself slipping inexorably into the supernatural world that consumed his subject.

Failed father, failed husband, and failed scholar, Charles Hayden hopes to put his life back together with a new project: a biography of Caedmon Hollow, the long-dead author of a legendary Victorian children's book, In the Night Wood, and forebear of his wife, Erin. Deep in mourning from the loss of their young daughter, they pack up their American lives, Erin gives up her legal practice, and the couple settles in Hollow's remote Yorkshire mansion.
In the neighboring village, Charles meets a woman he might have loved, a child who could have been his own daughter, and the ghost of a self he hoped to bury. Erin, paralyzed by her grief, immerses herself in pills and painting images of a horned terror in the woods.

In the primeval forest surrounding Caedmon Hollow's ancestral home, an ancient power is stirring, a long-forgotten king who haunts the Haydens' dreams. And every morning the fringe of darkling trees presses closer.

Soon enough, Charles and Erin will venture into the night wood.

Soon enough, they'll learn that the darkness under the trees is but a shadow of the darkness that waits inside us all.

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January-February 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection The End of the End of Everything (2015).

This short story originally appeared in Nightmare Magazine, June 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016, edited by Paula Guran and The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eight (2016), edited by Ellen Datlow.

Read the full story for free at Nightmare.

This novelette originally appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 119, August 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edited by John Joseph Adams and Charles Yu.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2012.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This Shirley Jackson Award nominated short story originally appeared in the anthology Lovecraft Unbound: Twenty Stories (2009), edited by Ellen Datlow. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Two (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010, edited by Paula Guran, and New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (2011), also edited by Guran. The story is included in the Ballingrud collection North American Lake Monsters (2013).

Read or listen to the full story for free at Drabblecast.

The End of the End of Everything, by Dale Bailey, is an sf/horror story about a long-married couple invited by an old friend to an exclusive artist's colony. The inhabitants of the colony indulge in suicide parties as the world teeters on the brink of extinction, worn away by some weird entropy.

This story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015, edited by Paula Guran, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo. It is included in the collection The End of the End of Everything (2015).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Dale Bailey's new collection, The End of the End of Everything, is filled with hope. As we rush headlong toward a "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" future, Bailey hangs back, refusing to let go of the indelible ferocity of the human heart. His stories are filled with the vibrant sound of those hearts, always beating. There is the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who is more human than any of those he meets in Hollywood; Eleanor, who works at the End-of-the-World Café, and who sees the depravity and despair of the Pit every day, yet never gives up hope for her ailing child; and young Tom, lost in a world scorched by the sun, who follows the rumor of angels still hanging on the wind.

Reminiscent of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, Dale Bailey mixes the macabre in with his melancholy, crafting stories that linger long after their reading. He sees a dark world that is growing darker, but he carries with him a light that refuses to go out.

Table of Contents:

• The End of the World as We Know It - (2004) - shortstory
• The Bluehole - (2013) - novelette
• The Creature Recants - (2013) - shortstory
• Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous - (2012) - novelette
• A Rumor of Angels - (2013) - novelette
• Eating at the End-of-the-World Café - (2010) - novelette
• Lightning Jack's Last Ride - (2015) - novelette
• Troop 9 - (2014) - novelette
• The End of the End of Everything - (2014) - novelette

Nebula Award nominated short story. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 2004. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best Fantasy 5 (2005), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, Nebula Awards Showcase 2007, edited by Mike Resnick, and Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (2008), edited by John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection The End of the End of Everything (2014).

Listen to a podcast of this story at Drabblecast.

The Ghoul Goes West by Dale Bailey is a fantasy novelette about two brothers, both obsessed with movies--one a not very successful screenwriter, the other an academic. When one dies from a drug overdose, his brother travels to Hollywood to investigate, and make amends for not being as supportive as he could have been.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, October 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed, April 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1995. The story can also be found in the anthology Nebula Awards 31 (1997), edited by Pamela Sargent. It is included in the collection The Resurrection Man's Legacy and Other Stories (2003).

A breathtaking collection of wonders and horrors--including robotic surrogate parents and zombie voters--from a new acknowledged master of darkest fantasy

Whether speculating on an all-too-possible future or plumbing the stygian depths of supernatural evil and human degradation, Dale Bailey's award-winning short fiction has been justifiably compared to the work of some of the true giants in the field--Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Theodore Sturgeon, to name but a few. In this first collection of astonishing stories, the acclaimed author of the modern horror masterworks The Fallen and House of Bones demonstrates his remarkable range with tales that exhilarate, terrify, and touch the soul.

A young boy comes of age on a secluded farm that grows a particularly grisly crop. The dead rise up to cast their ballots in a close presidential election. An assassin plots his next kill from inside the body of someone frighteningly close to the victim. An African American census taker discovers a hidden bayou town where time has stopped at a nightmarish point in history. Bailey takes readers inside the tents of a circus of shadows and explores an expectant father's dark and terrible legacy for his unborn child. This extraordinary collection runs the gamut from fantasy to horror, from science fiction to heartbreaking reality, speaking in voices, old and young, that brilliantly capture the light and the darkness of their ingeniously imagined worlds.

Table of Contents:

• Dale Bailey: In His Dominion - essay by Barry N. Malzberg
• The Resurrection Man's Legacy - (1995) - novelette
• Death and Suffrage - (2002) - novelette
• The Anencephalic Fields - (2000) - novelette
• Home Burial - (1994) - shortstory
• Quinn's Way - (1997) - novelette
• Touched - (1993) - shortstory
• The Census Taker - (2003) - novelette
• Exodus - (1997) - shortstory
• Cockroach - (1998) - novelette
• Sheep's Clothing - (1995) - novelette
• In Green's Dominion - (2002) - novelette
• Story Notes - essay